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theinternetcultureproject · 9 months ago

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As much as I hate to ruin the joke, the article is really good. Here it is in full!

Cory Doctorow 8 feb 2024

Last year, I coined the term “enshittification” to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers; it really hit the zeitgeist.

The American Dialect Society made it its Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the “great forces of history”, and into the material world of specific decisions made by real people; decisions we can reverse and people whose names and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say “things are getting worse”, though, of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. (It’s an English word. We don’t have ein Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free-for-all. Go nuts, meine Kerle.) But in case you want to be more precise, let’s examine how enshittification works. It’s a three-stage process: first, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, there is a fourth stage: they die.

Let’s do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook arose from a website developed to rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that. When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and K-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It effectively told them: Yes, I know you’re all using MySpace. But MySpace is owned by a billionaire who spies on you with every hour that God sends. Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world.

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end users. Those end users proceeded to lock themselves into Facebook. Facebook, like most tech businesses, had network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined Facebook because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But Facebook didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. So Facebook’s end users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then Facebook exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers and publishers.

To the advertisers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? Well, we do. And we will sell you access to that data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.

To the publishers, Facebook said: Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? Ha! Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link and we will cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetise as you please. And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too.

Users, advertisers, publishers — everyone was locked in. Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialling down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers. For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen. For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt. And then Facebook started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting full text feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetisation.

When any of these groups squawked, Facebook just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learnt in the Darth Vader MBA:

“I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.”

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders. (This continued last week, when the company announced a quarterly dividend of 50 cents per share and that it would increase share buybacks by $50bn. The stock jumped.)

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service, but I can’t bring myself to quit,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit?” is razor-thin.

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then Facebook discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword. If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go. That’s terminal enshittification.

This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech euphemistically calls “pivoting”. Which is how we get pivots such as: In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called the “metaverse”.

That’s the procession of enshittification. But that doesn’t tell you why everything is enshittifying right now and, without those details, we can’t know what to do about it. What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP)? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants?

Is Mercury in retrograde?

Nope.

The period of free Fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google’s enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company’s AI panic — excuse me, AI pivot. And it can’t be Mercury in retrograde, because I’m a Cancer, and as everyone knows, Cancers don’t believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that’s a sign that the environment has changed, and that’s what happened to tech. Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honourable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses:

Competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Self-help. Computers are extremely flexible and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-Complete Von Neumann Machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company’s shareholders. Think of a boardroom table where someone says, “I’ve calculated that making our ads 20 per cent more invasive will net us 2 per cent more revenue per user.”

In a digital world, someone else might well say, “Yes, but if we do that, 20 per cent of our users will install ad blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, for ever.” This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory manoeuvre will prompt their users to google, “How do I disenshittify this?”

And, finally, workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn’t mean that tech workers don’t have labour power. The historical “talent shortage” of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another, better job.

They knew it and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures to be.

That’s why mottoes such as Google’s “Don’t be evil” and Facebook’s “Make the world more open and connected” mattered; they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It’s what the American academic Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe” or Elon Musk calls being “extremely hardcore”.

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn’t flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines. So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical “campuses”, with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered, rather than being made to work like government mules.

For bosses, there’s a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission. Namely, your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage and threaten to quit. Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification.

The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power. So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittocene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition between companies. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modelled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan. But starting in the 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called “consumer welfare”, which essentially held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant that was the best store, selling the best product �� not that anyone was cheating.

And so, all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed smaller companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with “predatory pricing” that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold. When Diapers.com refused Amazon’s acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100mn on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until Diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, an AT&T telephone operator who’d do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Today’s giants are not constrained by competition. They don’t care. They don’t have to. They’re Google.

That’s the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint — regulation — was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can’t agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can’t even agree on how to cater a meeting where they’d discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel. Five companies, or four, or three, or two or just one company can easily converge on a single message for their regulators, and without “wasteful competition” eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

This is why competition matters: it’s not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers; it’s because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there are plenty of things we don’t want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse and that’s a good thing. They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. We don’t want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook have been unscathed by European privacy law. That’s not because they don’t violate the GDPR. It’s because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU’s most notorious corporate crime havens. And Ireland competes with the EU’s other crime havens — Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and, sometimes, the Netherlands — to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment.

The Irish Data Protection Commission rules on very few cases, and more than two-thirds of its rulings are overturned by the EU courts, even though Ireland is the nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent. So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app.

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would surely come in handy. If you don’t want your privacy violated, you don’t need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each other’s throats, unable to capture their regulators. Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn’t just the ability to flout regulation, it’s also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today’s tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling MySpace users they needed to escape Murdoch’s crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, “Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here.” It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your MySpace username and password, and it would login to MySpace and pretend to be you, scraping everything waiting in your inbox and copying it to your Facebook inbox.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple’s market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac in the 1990s — so that offices were throwing away their designers’ Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — Steve Jobs didn’t beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office. He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could read and write Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: “Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?”

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that’s piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they’ll say you violated US laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive. Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple’s media stores and they’d bomb you until the rubble bounced. Try to scrape all of Google and they’ll nuke you until you glow.

Tech’s regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001. It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work — things such as ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone — with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offence. This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations. Here’s how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90 per cent of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on its platform sell with Amazon’s “digital rights management”, which locks it to Amazon’s apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90 per cent of the market. If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon’s encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a five-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offence.

That’s a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it’s also harsher than the punishment you’d get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck stop. It’s harsher than the sentence you’d get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

Think of our ad blockers again. Fifty per cent of web users are running ad blockers. Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony. (Jay Freeman, the American businessman and engineer, calls this “felony contempt of business-model”.)

So when someone in a boardroom says, “Let’s make our ads 20 per cent more obnoxious and get a 2 per cent revenue increase,” no one objects that this might prompt users to google, “How do I block ads?” After all, the answer is, you can’t. Indeed, it’s more likely that someone in that boardroom will say, “Let’s make our ads 100 per cent more obnoxious and get a 10 per cent revenue increase.” (This is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website.)

There’s no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn’t install a counter-app that co-ordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold. No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete or, in other words, “IP law”.

IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for “a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers”. And “app” is just a euphemism for “a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user”.

We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.

What about that fourth constraint: workers? For decades, tech workers’ bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators. Even after “felony contempt of business model” and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers’ sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamt of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over? That dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake start-up, get “acqui-hired” by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion. Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire you, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year, eight months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses’ worst impulses. Today, the response to “I refuse to make this product worse” is “turn in your badge and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out”.

I get that this is all a little depressing. OK, really depressing. But hear me out! We’ve identified the disease. We’ve identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labour. To reverse enshittification and guard against its re-emergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it’s actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They’re blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics. Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this; we just stopped enforcing them.

I’ve been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I’ve never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren’t taking this lying down. Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has run more than 80 pieces trashing Khan, insisting that she’s an ineffectual ideologue who can’t get anything done. Sure, that’s why you ran 80 editorials about her. Because she can’t get anything done.

Reagan and Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 1980s. But it’s awake, it’s back and it’s pissed off.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding “with an app” to escape enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they’re starting to figure it out. Recently, the main body of the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in places like Ireland.

In the US, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You probably have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988. The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a rightwing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren’t even all that embarrassing.

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn’t confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulent loudmouth who served as Nixon’s solicitor-general. Still, Congress got the idea that their own video records might be next, freaked out and passed the VPPA. That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. And the thing is, there are a lot of people who are angry about it. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a QAnon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing Gen Z into quoting Osama bin Laden?

Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?

Or that red state attorneys-general are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action — which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy — would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There’s a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That’s a lot farther away, alas. The EU’s DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You’ll be able to use WhatsApp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind. But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU’s got nothing for you. This is an area ripe for improvement. My big hope here is that Stein’s Law will take hold: anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.

Finally, there’s labour. Here in Europe, there’s much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the recent salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy. But even in the US, there’s a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers have realised they’re not founders-in-waiting. In Seattle, Amazon’s tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon’s warehouse workers, because they’re all workers.

We’re seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labour, with self-help bringing up the rear. It’s not a moment too soon, because the bad news is enshittification is coming to every industry. If it’s got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying: “It’s OK, we did it with an app.”

From Mercedes effectively renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dish soap, enshittification is metastasising into every corner of our lives. Software doesn’t eat the world, it just enshittifies it.

There’s a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification. Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive. It’s unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be sceptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn’t “enshittification” the same as “capitalism”? Well, no.

I’m not going to cape for capitalism. I’m hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy. But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavoured views could find each other, offer mutual aid and organise. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crap gadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand names and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn’t more important than the climate emergency, gender justice, racial justice, genocide or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we’ll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it’s joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device. We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to co-ordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” And it may be true that the law can’t force corporations to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation. But it can make them fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity — even if they don’t think you deserve it.

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Cory Doctorow is a special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a visiting professor of computer science at the Open University. His next book ‘The Bezzle’, published by Head of Zeus, is out this month. This piece is adapted from his Marshall McLuhan Lecture, delivered at the Embassy of Canada in Berlin last month

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sublimeobservationarcade · 2 years ago

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Populism In US Politics: Trump Making America Hate Again

Populism in US politics put Donald Trump in the White House. The buffoon turned out to be an incompetent and corrupt president who lasted just one term. The GOP MAGA politicians are right wing extremists who appear to be unfamiliar with the laws governing country. The US political system has been gamed by big business with members of congress and senators bought by vested interests. Populism has backed MAGA candidates as an antidote to this but they appear to be on the wrong side to achieve any real change.

The Populist Narratives in America

The American population, especially on the conservative side of politics, seems to be easily manipulated on issues of race, gender identity, and religion. The dominant white cohort is extremely sensitive about their sense of entitlement. Right wing politicians play the race card when they dog whistle up tropes like critical race theory in American schools. Anti-wokeism plays well politically with older white males around the country. Americans are great believers in conspiracies, indeed, it may well be one of their archetypal narratives. The government, it seems to them, is always out to get them. Whether this stems from pre-revolutionary times against their British masters, I am not sure.

Anti-Woke Populist Stories Playing To Trumpists

Totalitarian politics and fascist regimes always have a villain for their subjects to focus their frustrations upon. Someone to hate and blame. Conservatives stir up hate for liberals, non-white activists, women who don’t know their place, LGBTQI+ folk, and foreigners taking their jobs. In rural areas, there is traditional enmity for the federal government, as these people don’t see themselves as part of the big picture when it comes to America. These folks want to pick and choose the parts of America they belong to. They resent paying federal taxes on this basis, as anything that doesn’t fit in with their conception of America is a waste of taxpayer’s money. The religious right fit into this category, especially sovereign citizens who see their idea of God as the only true authority above them.

Guns and the place of the gun in American culture is another archetypal narrative. The gun played an important part in the founding of the US, in the revolution with armed citizens taking on the British. The gun is idealised as an iconic symbol of how the west was won in the war against the indigenous Indians. Gunslingers are the heroes of generations of small children and many of them never truly grew up. America made guns and gloried in their use. The gun provided each citizen with a perceived instrument of power and protection from danger. In reality, it has created an overly armed population increasing hundred fold the chances of dying from such weapons. Hollywood and the entertainment business, more generally, rewrites the gun story every minute of the day. Guns star in movies, TV shows and video games ad nauseum. Guns save Americans from aliens, vampires and supernatural monsters in the celluloid world. The gun is most often portrayed as the solution to most problems in most stories shown on screens across the country. Thousands of innocent children die from shooting massacres every year in America. Despite this the gun lobby, representing gun makers and users, stave off any political action via buying elected representatives in congress and the senate. Guns and conspiracies go hand in hand for those crafting the narratives driving American fears and paranoia.

Populism in politics is fed by stories painting opponents and their causes as villains. Liberals are going to infect your children in their schools with ideas about the evils of racism and how whites hurt black people in America over hundreds of years. Black people are going to be given unfair advantages of your white children in an America run by liberals. These are the fear mongering tropes being run around so called critical race theory. The messed up facts in this kind of messaging speaks volumes about the state of America in some parts. Reversing the roles of victim and perpetrator to promote unfounded and exaggerated fears is what the agents of divisiveness wish to achieve. To believe these distortions of the truth by denying historical facts indicates a lack of integrity and an emotive investment in fear and paranoia within the believers. Observing the supporters at Trump pollical rallies around America I don’t see many starving white Americans, indeed, they all look pretty well fed. They are volubly dissatisfied with their lot despite their well fed status. They obviously have a bone to pick with those in power but seem too dumb to see that Trump has been one of those in power for years. Trump has been a property developer avoiding paying tax and cutting corners whenever possible. He is no champion of the American underdog. These Trump supporters are either disingenuous or really stupid. These white Americans may be at the bottom of the dominant cohort ladder but they have been standing on the backs of blacks, women, poor foreigners and the like for generations. Somehow, they want to kick and blame those below them, rather than the people at the top screwing them blind. They have been fed on the idea that the pie is only so big and if they want a bigger slice, then, it comes out of the mouths of the disadvantaged. American capitalism is a dog eat dog story in the experience of these folk.

Andrew Neel at Pexels The land of the free seems to have a strong undercurrent of hate and prejudice. Black-hating and Jew-hating have lengthy traditions in America. Why is that? Why do those who have persecuted these peoples hold onto such ill feeling and pass it onto their children? Why do the abusers go on claiming to be the victims in such things? America is at a crossroads in terms of where it is going and how the rest of the world views it. Populism in US politics is splitting the land in two once again. Will there be another civil war under the banner of racial hate and divisiveness? Trump is never going to make America great again only make America hate again. by Robert Sudha Hamilton ©WordsForWeb Read the full article

#American #gundeaths #politics #power #Trump

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kittyprincessofcats · 3 years ago

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Shitshow 2.2

So, because Worlds was coming up and I didn’t even realize until two days ago, I decided to finally finish what I called “watching The Shitshow Part 2 while even worse shit goes on on the world” - aka the Women’s Free Skate at the Olympics. I didn’t watch this sooner because frankly, I just didn’t want to.

But yeah, I finally did. Thoughts under the cut.

- First I want to say that I still feel so bad for Mana :((. Her getting having a redemption from this is low-key my biggest wish for Worlds. I also saw that unfortunately some people were hating on her online (because she got the spot over Mai, I think) - and like... get a grip. I get the frustration of not having your fave at the Olympics (hello, Rika stan here), but that’s not a reason to be straight up gleeful when a young skater has a bad skate at the Olympics. I also saw some people say they “just don’t want Hamada’s methods to be rewarded”... funny how that doesn’t stop the Eteri girls from having a huge fanbases. (Though I agree that I want Mana and every other young skater far away from their abusive coaches.)

- I still can’t stand Mariah’s face or her scores. And the audience reaction to her made me realize that US-American fans can be just as annoying as the Russian ones - stop screaming already ffs, you’re embarrassing.

- Anastasia Gubanaova’s free skate was absolutely beautiful. Her emotions after she finished the skate said it all. And she really should have placed ahead of Mariah here. As we see it’s not just the Russians who are overscored and I already have a bad feeling about Worlds.

YELIM was amazing 😭. What a great skate! Her jumps are so pleasing to watch. That first combo was gorgeous. And the way she side-eyed the score in the Kiss and Cry was a mood. God, I hate this sport - or rather, I hate the way it’s currently scored and this really isn’t about the Russians anymore. There’s so much corruption in every score and it’s not even subtle. You can always tell in advance based on their passport who’s going to be scored harsher than who. I always have fun watching the performances themselves and then the scores come up and all the fun is ruined - every time.

- Alysa just seems like a really likable person, but what’s the deal with the whole US team promoting NFTs? (Though granted, she’s very young.) (Also, did you hear that story about their father getting targeted by Chinese government spies? That’s some scary stuff.)

- Alysa, Yelim and Loena being cute in the green room (is that what it’s called?) was nice.

- Young was AMAZING - that skate was worthy of that bronze medal, I mean 5th place, I mean “provisional” 6th place. This program is so perfect for her. I just love the music of LesMis and she’s really gotten a lot better at putting emotion into her performances (I always used to feel that she was very jump-focused with not much room for anything else). Also, since Rika couldn’t be here it just made me a bit emotional to see her former training mates like Young and Mana here.

WAKABA ❤️❤️❤️ - speaking of Rika memories! I hadn’t actually seen Wakaba’s program yet because I barely watched any skating this season, so I didn’t know it started with the same music as Rika’s Lion King exhibition program! But that was a nice surprise :) And yeah, no wonder people were hyping this program up, it’s amazing! That moment when she landed the 3A and everyone cheered - yeah, I felt that. I love this music (and she also definitely had the best outfit of the day). It’s also just so special and emotional to finally see Wakaba at the Olympics after everything. I just wish she wasn’t treated so badly there. The score should have definitely been higher again. And the fact that she won silver would have won silver if it weren’t for the doping participants... *sigh* This world isn’t fair. (And arguably she would have even won gold without the inter-Japan scoring unfairness - but I’m not enough of a figure skating judge to make that call between her and Kaori here.)

- Speaking of Kaori: AMAZING. She’s such a joy to watch on the ice! Her speed and flow out of her jumps never cease to amaze me. I will say that I absolutely HATE this program, but she worked with the awful stuff she was given and did the best you can do with it. It’s a shame that she had to win that gold bronze with this free program though, when both of her previous ones (The Matrix and The Piano) were absolute masterpieces. Also I can’t even imagine the pressure of having to skater after “overscored to hell and back” Trusova, who you thought was your biggest competition for that bronze and whose screaming fans are probably also hard to deal with mentally. Oh yeah, and having to skate with the knowledge that your competition doped and got away with it - that, too. Kaori did so well and deserves this medal so much after how much she’s been robbed in the last years. Sometimes it hits me that she should have two World medals (Silver in 2019 and Gold in 2021) by now, but she was robbed of both of them. I’m SO happy she finally got one of those big medals and at the most important event, too! Her bronze is the only valid thing about this event (though it should be gold, but you know). And yes, without having analyzed it in detail, I think I’d give Kaori the victory over Wakaba here, at least in the free skate (Wakaba had a fall) - though I’m not sure how big Wakaba’s lead after the SP should have been.

- And yeah, this time it was very noticable that the JSF people in the audience cheered for Kaori but not for Wakaba. The exact same thing as during the Men’s, when they cheered for Yuma and Shoma, but not for Yuzu. It’s telling to say the least. If you want proof people aren’t making up the stuff about JSF being unfair, just watch those reactions.

And that’s about it! Oh... wait, did you want me to talk about the Russians because they don’t get enough attention yet? Fine, okay. I’ll try to make it short.

- First things first: What they’re all going through under that abusive coach is terrible and was painful to watch. They all deserve so much better than that and I really hope they get out of there. People weren’t kidding when they said the entire last part of the free skate requires a trigger warning.

- Next: I feel bad for these girls on a human “They’re abused kids who’ve been put through hell” level. I can’t say I feel bad for them on a “some of them didn’t win” level though, as some people apparently do. I’ve seen quite a few takes about “poor Sasha who doesn’t have a gold medal” and “poor Kamila who doesn’t have an individual OGM, can’t go to Worlds and will probably lose that Euros title and team medal”. And on that level - nope, I don’t agree at all. They were never entitled to those medals or their frankly insanely inflated scores in the first place. It’s cruel that they were taught that those medals are all that matters, but it’s not cruel that they didn’t get them. Kamila shouldn’t even have been allowed to compete here (and not competing would have probably been better for her). Sasha has awful skating skills and nothing but quads (that weren’t even landed cleanly). That shouldn’t be enough. And the fact that it was enough for NC is NOT a good thing. So get your “OGM Sasha” takes out of here. When I finally watched her skate, I couldn’t believe that this is what people were saying she was “robbed” over. Though to be clear, Anna’s not much better. Her jumps hurt my eyes so badly. She’s just more musical and better at hiding her flaws. The point is they’re all overscored to insanity. The judges were so obviously trying to make them completely untouchable and it took a complete meltdown from Kamila for someone else to get onto the podium. That’s the state this sport is at and I hate it with a passion. (Oh yeah, and if you disagree with them getting banned from Worlds unfollow and block me up. Ukrainian athletes are hiding in bunkers and getting killed as we speak. Get out of here with your pity party for the Russians.)

- At least that awful Bolero program didn’t win and at least Kaori got to have a proper medal ceremony and actually take her bronze home.

- Also, because of Russia’s war against Ukraine, I want to mention that these girls are being used as propaganda whether they like it or not. All Russian athletes are. Whether they personally agree with Putin or not doesn’t matter for that. They’re being hailed as “heroes of Russia” for winning those medals. And it doesn’t matter at all that they had a slightly different name and flag. It also doesn’t matter that the scores are completely fake and corrupt.

It doesn’t even matter that the Team Gold might be stripped from Russia later (or that the team event is a scam Russia invented to get more gold medals in the first place) - those athletes are still being hailed as Olympic champions NOW. Kamila is being hailed as an Olympic champion NOW. So are the literal facists Sinitsina/Katsalapov. When they eventually hopefully lose those medals, Russia will just spread a narrative about how “Our champions are being unfairly robbed, it’s Russiaphobia!” All they care about is medals at all costs, no matter how fake or unfair. All they want is to spread a message of Russian superiority, because that’s what fascist states do. The sport doesn’t matter. All that matters is “Our country is better than the others and these results prove it”. And, moment of honesty: That attitude from Russian media and fans is why I could never bring myself to fully support any Russian skater.

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mormonmonastery · 3 years ago

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(Venting anon. TW for mentions of homophobic violence as well) I just… I haven’t been active for more than a couple weeks at a time for four years now, and I wasn’t expecting to be hit this hard. But it really hurts! The gun imagery hurts when last weekend a lesbian couple were shot and killed in Moab! For the first time in ages today I walked around in public feeling like someone was going to see the gay on me and shout me down for it. The more things like this happen, the more I want to just sever myself from the whole thing. I don’t observe any of the rules anymore, and I have no clue what I think about God, aside from feeling like His chosen left me behind. But I don’t quite have the nerve to properly get my name removed. Plus new roommates moved in for the new school year and I have no idea how they’ll be about me being gay, so I’ve been avoiding being home all day because I keep tearing up over it and AHHH 😭

I feel a deep sympathy for how you're feeling, despite not really being able to imagine just how awful it feels to be attacked like this. I'm sorry that you're stuck feeling this stress and that one man's cruel and irresponsible language still impacts you even after you've taken some steps back from the church for your own comfort, health, and safety. That's really the important response. All that follows are reactions that your message sparked in me and which you can take and leave as you see fit.

I'm hoping that, because it was an address only delivered to BYU faculty instead of something like a conference talk or a devotional, that this will end up being a relatively small ripple in the discourse pond for most average Mormons; that at most they'll hear a few rumblings about it before moving on and that we won't see it pointed to as a justification for more hate or violence. I don't know how well that hope is placed. And even if its harm is confined to BYU...that's still a large population of people placed at greater risk. Even what you tell me already about feeling less safe just existing in public is enough to damn anyone who prompted that fear while claiming to speak in the name of God.

I believe what the New Testament writer said when they wrote that God has not given us a spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7). Because of that, I don't think anyone who use their power to create fear is speaking with any of God's spirit in them for as long as they persist in fearmongering and the perpetuation of hatreds. I believe that if there is a time when Elder Holland stands before Christ at the judgement day, he'll have to understand and accept responsibility for the exact fear his words caused you to feel and for the miscarriage of his stewardship in saying them. I don't usually like so baldly saying that God will prove someone else wrong; it's a card that's usually best left unplayed and I think it a mean thing to make God into your cudgel. But, frankly, I would not want anything to do with a God who would not outright condemn this kind of speech, who would stoop to the small and petty level that endorsing it would mean. I choose not to believe in any God like that because they have no continuity with the God I have encountered; if such a cruel God somehow turns out to exist, I would rather walk backwards into hell.

It strikes me as grievously irresponsible to reprise Neal Maxwell's whole "musket and trowel" metaphor to compare continuing to persecute LGBT+ people with a historic instance of Mormon persecution, particularly when DezNat is a thing that exists. I honestly don't know how intentional that was, but I also think that if Holland was intending to wink at DezNat he couldn't have found a quote that would be better at achieving that if he tried. I'm sick and weary of even metaphorical violence and I long for the prince of peace. I don't know anything about the couple shot in Moab, but it does indicate the preponderance of violence in our society and the persistence of violence against queer people specifically—which makes telling people to aim their metaphorical muskets at anyone a rhetorical flourish that is distasteful at best and even worse in this context.

I agree with the Latin American liberation theologians that, while God loves all of their children unconditionally, they have a "preferential option" for the poor (literally and in spirit) and the marginalized. I believe you're God's chosen at least as much, and quite arguably more than, any church leader, so long as you wish to claim God's preference or believe a God exists in that way.

It is sad to feel left behind by church leaders but, at least for me, the larger sensation is this sadness from the other direction. It's sad to realize that a man like Jeffrey Holland, who I have received inspiration and comfort from hearing in the past and who I feel like God has been able to use as a messenger for me at times—it's simply sad to see him refuse to move past an attitude and set of beliefs that I can see as so clearly unchristlike and to mistake them for a unique and essential aspect of Christ's gospel. I want to have charity for my brothers and sisters who I see as being stuck there but it's hard—I feel overwhelmingly sad and frustrated and impatient and remorseful about them and it is hard to alchemize those feelings into charity. It's sad for me to feel like, if I'm to continue to grow spiritually and ethically, I might very well have to leave behind this person whose words have at times been an aid to my own spiritual growth. I think that's why my reaction and the reaction of others has been to feel a little more hurt and a little more betrayed than whenever the general authorities who are more frequent purveyors of homophobia deliver this kind of talk—they rarely gave up that kind of talk long enough to inspire me. Of course I knew or intuited on an intellectual level that Holland wasn't significantly better or more enlightened on these issues, but it feels different to see it displayed publicly like this. And it's sad to me to see people I like and respected on the other side what seems to be an ever-widening and impassable gulf in how we understand who the God that has revealed themselves to us is and what their character is like. I cannot believe that God could bring about or observe a situation in which two people were capable of sincere, consensual, and committed love for each other and then condemn them for living in that love and promise to erase their capacity for that love in the resurrection. Apparently, Jeffery Holland can believe that and believe it quite strongly. It's sad for me to realize that about him and about so many other people in the church like him.

#as you can see. this is also my own vent.

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i-eat-pretty-things · 1 year ago

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oh my gods, i never thought i'd find someone like this ever, i thought being stuck in the middle is actually really weird. like, i often find myself replying with "it depends" to questions or if i share my opinion in something, i open it and say something like "well of course, you can argue against what i said with these points, and that's valid" its like i could never fully commit myself to one mode of thinking! and it frustrated me for the longest fucking time because it made me feel so small compared to others who have strong convictions; "THIS is what i believe and Im STICKING TO IT NO MATTER WHAT" idk but i cant fucking do that 😭😂 i would take steps back and go "hmmm... are you sure? sounds a bit extreme..."

not all our views line up...

i dont read about politics, and i dunno if the right-left thing doesnt work where im from since i aint american? but most of the time, nothing much about my home changes, no matter who's in charge. i would say im pro-choice. i dunno if i would call myself a feminist or not, i don't read a lot about today's feminist movement. i would say that i dont consider myself a Catholic anymore, just whatever was taught to me doesn't jive. i love the freedom of witchcraft, but i dont like the word "manifestation" (my mom uses it all the time and it sounds soooo new agey) even though that's what a lot of—if not all— practitioners do. i also love how our living world and its wonders have logical explanations from science, its fascinating how we know all this stuff and how a lot of it are backed up by evidence and tests, but it sometimes gets in the way of how i feel about spirits, fey/fae, sirens/mermaids and other mystical, wonderful things. i think mentioning aliens are kind of silly but that's probably because the people around me use them in contexts like "they built the pyraminds of giza" even though i believe they were built by human hands. but if you were to tell me that aliens exist because the unfathomabke amount of planets out there would have at least ONE with intelligent life, i would believe you. i agree with what you said, 'hunting for sport' just feels... unnecessary and cruel. although i dont think they should be used against humans either, i can still understand why one would need it for defense. i've grown a little fascinated by archery but I don't have any plans to hunt with it, at the very most I'd do what Merida does in Brave, riding a horse and shooting targets to get that feeling. also im pansexual, just felt like adding hehe XD

... but i think that's a really good thing! that means there will be hours upon hours of just talking and learning from each other. honestly sounds like a great time! i hope... 😅

and o boy, i hate narcissists too, and i never really got people who call themselves empaths. i dont remember if i ever encountered one face to face, but just seeing them make themselves the stars of the show online for no good reason makes me want to punch into a sidewalk or something. it makes me physically violent.

i think i get what you feel when you write about youself like this, i felt pretty embarassed wiritng all this ^-^|| like maybe i got it all totally wrong and just embarassed myself. but what do i have to lose lol , its worth a shot💜

hope my response wasnt a bother to read, i really enjoyed your post and resonated with the feeling, so i thought i'd hop on the convo. hope you have a good rest of your day!

Reasons why my ass will never fit in anywhere:

I HATE EXTREMES

I like both liberal and conservative beliefs, but I also hate both liberal and conservative beliefs. Anyone who is on one extreme or the other, I most likely will not get along with.

I consider myself Christian. But ya know what, I dislike a lot of Christians. Oh boy do I love my god! But sometimes Christian's can be such a-holes.

Oh, and I may believe in god, but I love learning about other beliefs. Especially witchcraft. Magic gets them nips hard 😆

Oh yeah and I have a very non Christian sense of humor.

Humor is very important to me. It's the only way I can cope with this fucked up life.

I'm a gun loving vegan who is pro life and, yes go ahead and send me hateful messages about how stupid I am, I am kind of anti feminist as well. Do I believe in equality? yes. I am all for equality. Do I believe feminists now days believe in equality? Sorry but not really. Will I hate you if you call yourself a feminist? Nah, that would be stupid. But if you hate me for not calling myself a feminist, we won't get along. And if you're a guy who makes fun of women, we also won't get along.

I am pro gun because I believe we should be able to defend ourselves. But I don't believe that we should use them for hunting. I understand hunting for survival. But if you hunt for sport and find it fun, you either don't know any better because you grew up in a home where that was normalized (I've been there) or you're a fucking psychopath.

If you laugh at or get offended by people having compassion for children or animals, we can't be friends.

Am I a crazy person who believes in conspiracy theories? Sometimes. One thing I know for sure is I'm not a flat earther. But I do think it's crazy if you don't believe in the possibility of aliens. I MEAN COME ON THERE'S SO MANY PLANETS OUT THERE AND YOU'RE TELLING ME THAT EARTH IS THE ONLY ONE WITH LIFE ON IT??

Doubt it.

I'm all for body positivity. If you can love yourself for who you are, that is absolutely great and I love that. But don't go around talking shit and bashing people who want to wear makeup, get plastic surgery or promote getting healthy. People can do whatever makes them happy as long as they aren't physically harming someone. The idea that someone getting surgery or talking about health will hurt some insecure person's feelings so we shouldn't do it is just ridiculous. Someone who is insecure will most likely be hurt by a lot of things. It's no reason to attack someone. So basically positivity isn't just for those who are anti makeup or anti surgery. Guys, let's stop bashing people for wearing makeup or getting a nose job. Its getting really annoying and its turning into bullying. Instead of bashing, let's lift each other up and be encouraging.

I am bisexual. Because equality haha but that's really not something that is accepted by Christians. So I don't really go to church. I don't really feel welcome.

I love deep conversations. I'm okay with small talk. But I'm not really interested in a friendship where that's all there is to it. Sure I'll pick up the phone and ask how your day is going and ask what you've been up to. But I also love when someone goes "so I've been thinking a lot lately about past lives and shit" or talk about your likes/dislikes. Let's talk about fears or places you'd like to travel. Would you rather questions and jokes that make zero sense but they make you laugh so hard it hurts. What dreams have you had this week and do you think they mean anything? Just deep shit mixed in with some casual "I just found something new at the store and i love it" whether that's a new vegan product, paintbrushes, a crystal.. idc I just love hearing about beliefs and things that make you happy.

Also if you like going shooting and want a buddy to tag along, I'll totally go. I'll also go shopping. Just because I like guns and getting my hands dirty doesn't mean I don't want to go to the mall and find cute shit.

On the negative side, sometimes I get angry at those that lack compassion and empathy. Narcissists really get my blood boiling. But I also really hate when people who are just looking to get angry over every little thing call themselves empaths. You aren't an empath, you just like complaining about everything and talking crap about others to feel better about yourself. A lot of these "empaths" have very narcissistic traits.

Oh yeah, I grew up with covert narcissistic siblings. So you could say I'm very fucked up emotionally and probably have some toxic traits because of my childhood. But you know what, it's also made me very understanding and less judgmental of some people. It's made me realize that you can't always trust anyone and that sometimes the people that you think are bad, are really just the victim.

Also, I may sound very narcissistic right now writing all this shit about myself, but you know what? I actually never really talk about myself that much. I never open up and I never tell people who I really am because I'm always scared that people will think I only care about myself. But thats not the case. I really hope that someday I can find someone who can know all of this about me be like "hey me too" and actually understand what its like. I love my husband so much. He's always been supportive of me and the least judgmental out of everyone in my life. But sometimes it gets so lonely because it feels like no one fully understands. Almost everyone hates me for not taking sides. Someone will hate me for being shy because i don't ever text or call or start a conversation. It's not because I don't like you, its because I don't want to bother you. And no matter how much you tell me that I'm not bothering you, I will always still feel like I'm bothering you. One of my toxic traits lol And others will hate me for opening up and telling them my beliefs because I'm either dumb for caring about animals or I'm dumb for being pro life or I'm a sinner because I don't fit and this perfect little box that Christians want me to fit into blah blah blah.

So far it feels like I'm screwed either way.

If anyone sees this and goes "dude me too" tell me about it. I want to find my tribe. Even if my vibe is a little all over the place lol I hope to find those like me. People who love balance, deep conversations, and don't mind going a while without talking but pick right back where we left off because grudges suck and real friends don't have to talk 24/7 to be real friends 😁

Hopefully I don't sound too much like a bitch. Lol

#anti extremist #finally #long post #never thought id see something like this #i hope this makes sense #am i using the tags right

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rametarin · 3 years ago

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I just remembered, ‘The Wishbone.’

I’ve mentioned ad nauseum about how when I was a kid, those child soldier type cultural guerillas were running around, “twying to stawt convuhsayshuns,” prompted by their parents to do so. Because it was a way to use their kids to disguise important social issues and topics while making it seem like the kids themselves just did that. Then they’d be there as social support to reinforce what the kid says, when they inevitably go to adults to intervene and arbitrate arguments they didn’t know and couldn’t prove one way or another. Because, kids.

But as I sit here remembering the misc. times this happened over the course of my childhood (yeah, my memories go back that far,) I remembered a commonality that happened curiously often.

The Wishbone Maneuver. And I call it a maneuver because when something just coincidentally happens handfuls of times, it’s not coincidence. Always right on a schedule, always conveniently during a discussion.

So it works like this. Lets say it starts with a random field trip. And a conversation occurs between students/peers. Inevitably, someone will segue the conversation a little. Maybe with a jokey joke. You know, to set the tone for the new ‘convuhsayshun.’

They may make a crass joke about Washington killing Native Americans, or Columbus doing it. “Teehee! Yeah! [Fictional Hero] really squashed them! Deader than all those natives Washington killed!”

Any learned child of the 80s to early 90s at the time would get PTSD, because now you’re at... The Juncture. It could begin and end with that little “jokey joke” that tries to reinforce, “the founding fathers were bad (white) people, WEEREN’T THEEEEY?” in the culture.

You know. Kind of the way German/Nazi sympathizers would go around the US making casually antisemitic jokes? Because these are psychological methods used to strong arm people into going along with and playing off the bigotry of other people. Not even necessarily racial, sexual or ethnic bigotry; it’s also how they try to strongarm and steer people into Odd Man Outing individuals and communicating indirectly that they’re untouchable pariahs, and defending them is so indefensible that you’ll be brought down with them unless you chuckle and nod in agreement.

Only they directed it as ideological opponents. Constantly. And as a child of the 80s/90s, you knew the ball was in their court for what was said next. Because it was either just going to be a “simple joke” (pivoting away if there was too big a blowback/problem) or a segue into a conversation about what a shithead George Washington and by extension the founding fathers were.

But, what if you countered by also bringing up how Che Guevera was a shithead out of the blue. They don’t like that. Because now YOU’VE introduced a “jokey-joke” non-sequitor about a figure THEY might like. It does kind of expose that you know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and that it wasn’t just a “jokey joke.” They take note of people that understand what they are and what they’re doing, because these methods are used to try and argue you in bad faith towards their ideological mindset with as little interpersonal argument as possible.

So if you just kick over the duckblind and let them know you see EXACTLY what ideological bias they’re coming to the table from, that you will not allow them to just be, “generally critical of bad historical figures,” but in fact force them out of an offensive, entrenched, sniping position and into one of running defense, then they get upset.

You’re not supposed to have this sort of experience or knowledge dealing with tankies or pinkos. If they pull off the benign interactions well enough, they try to get you thinking like they do with a minimum of struggle between you. Disguised as, “just general conversations about history and facts.” Which are shaved, doctored, manipulated and hair-did specifically and coincidentally to portray a certain view of only specific events and people in history robbed of enough context and smoothed out with benefit of the doubt in their direction to beg you to adopt it as fact.

Anyway. The Wishbone.

So for every negative fact they give about George Washington, you give them one about someone like Pol Pot, or Che Guevera, or Tito, or Mao. Because you’re just making JOKEYJOKES! Right, ole buddy ole pal? No unstated ideological bias here at all, no sir! Hahaha, I’m just like you! I sure hate those conformist sheep and study history! Hahahaha! You just so happen to shit all over the historical figures tied to ideologies they like and are supporting by tearing down their ideological enemies.

They can then do their pre-rehearsed spiel about what a shithead any given Founding Father did. Which, if you’re educated young enough, you already know, and match them point for point with, “how shitheaded historical figures are” by pointing out how figures like Marx let their kids starve to death. Just exchangin playful character assassination implied to invalidate everything they believed in, fought for, preached and stood for, you know! Just having fun! Making jokeyjokes! ^.^

Well the wishbone maneuver comes when a second person that you didn’t know was part of this conversation flanks you. They were always part of what this conversation would become, because they’re literally the airforce and wingman of the first shit stirrer. They swoop in and segue the conversation just enough so now you’re conversing with two people, not one.

And they both want to talk to you. But the purpose of this now is to try and polarize you, leaping off from your statements and attacking your defenses from another angle. The Third Party might bring up what a shithead Jefferson was, and try to make you defend slavery in order to defend Jefferson. They’re going to demand, through the rules of social convention, that you somehow address two conflicting points about two conflicting figures with the same point, and both reserve the right to interject and mock you if what you say doesn’t apply to their figure.

“Well this other founding father also killed natives and raped their slaves. YOUR argument is that raping slaves and killing people are bad things. Guess you think Jefferson sucked, too.”

Do you see what they’re doing? They dress up this wing-man approach. From the very start this third party was on the outskirts, waiting for a signal. Because the entire point of this engagement was to either spread propaganda or culturally negatively reinforce a view of historical figures through “candid conversation.” They showed up with an axe to grind and disguised it as genial conversation, and even had someone waiting during this pre-meditated farce of a conversation to either support them or bail them out of it if it went sour.

I saw this happen too many times, too similar in the ways it happened, always from the sort of people when caught on and called out in a group for their shit, resorting to the same excuse. “I was just twying to stawt a convuhsayshun. uwu.”

This is one of the many reasons I believe there’s a playbook for this kind of shit, and I only wish I knew what book of techniques and methods they were drawing from to teach their kids to do this. I distinctly remember this shit happening too many god damned times. It used to take me by surprise, but I was left dumbfunded, frustrated and blindsided so often I just started noticing the pattern.

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carry-on-my-wayward-butt · 4 years ago

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He did? Umm.. what happened exactly?

(referring to this post)

my 11th grade chemistry teacher had an associates degree in liberal arts.

you know how in virtually every class you’ve ever had since middle school, your teachers made a big stink about the syllabus? she didn’t have one. this was her first teaching job, which she got because of her length experience as a substitute, not by her licensing qualifications. we were, at first, excited to have her, because she was a “fun sub” and we were 17 years old and stupid as all shit. we were the “normal chem” class in a system where the only other options were “honors chem” which was filled with children who actually know how to study (or cheat) and have an air of proper student activity, and “AP Chem”, which is clear enough if you’ve been an american student in the last 15 years.

she followed the mcgraw hill chemistry book in order of chapters, despite the fact that our state standardized tests did several of the chapters out of order. ever notice how you’ll suddenly be looking at chapter 11 when just last week you were on chapter 5, then the next week you’re on chapter 8? standardized testing is the reason. anyways by asking my friends in other classes who had chemistry teachers of relative competence, i was able to discern which chapters i should focus on, and while she was distracted with literally watching youtube videos all period, I was turning around in my seat and walking across the classroom helping my friends and enemies with the packets. (she was a two-packets-a-week kinda teacher.)

yes i said enemies too. the people i hated, i hated because they were sons of bitches i wouldnt piss on to put out a fire. i hated them so dearly i used to pray to god that they would bump into me so i could throw myself into the concrete and split my forehead open and get them expelled due to the blood-clause of our “zero-tolerance policy”. two of the kids in my class had, only the previous year, attempted to set my hair on fire.

i hated the teacher more.

it gave me extreme pleasure to see her fume and clench her fists when a student would say “i need help” across the classroom and she would move to get up and they would say “oh not you miss, im waiting for vicky.” jesus christ the only time ive ever felt a comparable high was when i was at a halloween party in college where i was literally so zooted i couldn’t move.

it got worse over time, her getting more and more angry, my ego growing larger and larger. i was a huge bitch in high school, i really thought i was the smartest bitch in the room at any given moment. severe main character syndrome. imagine that kind of person actually being right for 45 minutes out of every day. can you even comprehend the kind of frustration that would create? in a room full of little sociopaths who dont give a shit about anything but getting this joke of a class over with so they can graduate? your first real teaching job and they look right past you, the teacher, to this annoying little shit whose grades are completely abysmal? how are they managing to learn anything from a child who can barely speak in front of more than 10 people? who turns cherry red in the face of literally every authority figure in the building except you? who can’t concentrate and stay still in one spot for more than five minutes? all of your other classes behave! they listen! they sit down and shut up and do the packets! so what fucking gives!!!

so you say “fine, since you all HATE ME so much i just won’t teach then!!!” on literally week fucking ten of teaching. and instead of prostrating themselves before you, begging you to like... point at transparencies and read directly from powerpoints i guess.

and they all collectively say “okay” and let the chipmunk child flutter between desks and help them memorize formulas and mnemonic devices and shit. surely her grades will suffer if she’s constantly dealing with other people and you’ll have justification that her horseshit is “distracting” and “a detriment to her studies”. she got bored gave up on that after two days after nothing changed.

then we did the midterm.

except at the end of the exam packet was something we never learned because again, she was going through the book chronologically. because i actually enjoyed the chem book (so much that i stole it when the year was up lmao), i knew the material.

it was about lewis dots/structures. i couldn’t tell you a damn thing about it today but in december 2010 i absolutely knew that shit. i didnt have too much of a problem with it in the exam, but the students who had gotten to that point were complaining and at first she pulled that “you should have been studying independently uwu” shit but the class was about to get loud during exam period so she shushed us and said that when we get to that point, just stop, and she’ll mark it correct during grading, no harm no foul just keep it quiet. one of the more confrontational students called horseshit and said theres no way we’re trusting that and there’s definitely no way anyone will keep an entire classroom cheating at the instruction of the teacher quiet.

i offered to teach it.

she scoffed, rolled eyes, said “sure fine but you can’t get your exam back” and i said “okay.” so when everyone was to the point in the exam, we piled them all on her desk and i used the whiteboard to briefly and quietly explain lewis dots, used the book examples and problems, and helped the other kids understand. there were a couple exam questions that were lifted straight from the book problems so i skipped those. while teaching i realized i had gotten a couple wrong which sucked :( it was an incredibly stupid experience overall, and no teacher worth the paper their certification is printed on would have allowed that to happen. and fucking yet.

anyways everyone but me got their exams back and finished it and many of us passed, only a few of them did particularly well.

discussing the chem exam with friends who also took the chem exam, many students found their anecdote about the lewis dots to be confounding, for you see, the exam we took was not, in fact, the midterm, but the god damned final.

she had us taking the fucking final because she didnt read the fucking folders which read “midterm” and “final exam” on them

she was reprimanded severely and we all had to take the exam on different days, in different classrooms, sitting very far apart. after that she hated me even more. like girl it was your fault lmao i am literally a teenager grow up lol. anyways you can imagine how much more fucking insufferable i became, knowing how miserable she was.

it all came to a head in february when some students were giggling quietly following a minor fuck up on her part regarding bellwork. they were making fun of her like “are you sure thats not tomorrows bellwork lol” and a friend next to me did the “hey i need help wait no miss not you sorry” thing and when i answered him, she solidly snapped. blah blah YOURE SOOOO DISTRACTING blah blah YOU THINK YOURE SOOOO SMART DONT YOU blah blah blah and she was like demanding i leave the room and shouting at the top of her lungs at me “ YOU POISON THE MINDS OF EVERY OTHER STUDENT HERE. YOU’RE POISONOUS VICTORIA, YOU’RE A VIRUS IN THIS CLASSROOM.”

i will never forget that line as long as i live. it was like crack to me. i moved to open the door to leave and the vp opened it first. he escorted me to the office and asked me what happened, then told me to keep my head down in class from now on, and that if i wanted to help my friends i should give them my number and help them out on our own time. i was like “bro thats really stupid” and he was like “thats all we can do right now but i promise we’re working on it”

i lasted the rest of the year giving smug smiles as we did packet after fucking packet for the rest of the year. they were all take-home work. i wasnt comfy giving my number to my enemies. the class camaraderie ended.

the final was altered. my class took a different final than the rest of the normal chem classes.

i started 12th grade and got a solid case of senioritis. i told that story to anyone who would listen. while it was happening, i obviously told my favorite teacher everything as it happened. when i mentioned it senior year he was like “oh yeah i forgot about her,

she was fired over the summer.”

#let me tell you bitch i SCREAMED......#anyways im not sorry this was long #its literally the only cool thing thats ever happened to or about me so shrugs #Anonymous

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lyrichartwell · 4 years ago

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so psycholonials has pretty obvious problems, right? like, hussie’s decision to draw the character’s without skin tone is Not Good (even if he has abandoned the “aracial” thing given that Z is probs canonically chinese-american??) personally I still like the game? I think the writing is spot-on, the scenario it introduces is interesting, and while the characters are messy and misanthropic for the most part, i really like them. Part 1 of this conversation is realizing you can like a thing while still having critiques of it. I overall enjoy the game and think it has many positives, but also hussie’s approach to drawing skin tone(i.e. not doing that) is Bad. How people parse that for themselves is obvs gonna be pretty personal. what’s frustrating is people making a much bigger deal out of cancelling the game over things that.... do not.... exist? Like, I am fucking begging y’all to attain even a basic level of reading comprehension for the love of god. not only does the approach of “thing bad, pls review bomb” for flaws that are not actively malicious suck, but you could at least do that for problems that??? actually exist??? two bi characters joking about their bisexuality being erased is not fucking biphobia. like, it is a joke at the expense of biphobic arguements it is not biphobia. i just, i swear to god. and again, the “fragile millenials” line is a joke from Z’s perspective about ableism it is not the view of the characters or author????? it’s like, oh she notices she’s lacking energy bc depression and visualizes it as spoons and that’s a thing that boomers or ableists hate so internally she goes “haha i’m doing the fragile millenial thing” and has a chuckle. Same with like. being a bi person with a preference for men. biphobes will try to say “oh you’re actually straight” and that’s stupid, obviously. so this very online person jokes about her preference for men by calling herself a “problematic heterosexual”, and then obvs z and abby have this whole thing with each other and i just. like. the relationships between the characters, Z being an incredibly self-deprecating person, both of them being Very Online, this informs the narrative style which is v much influenced by her voice. It Is. So Easy To See. i am just begging people to learn how to read beyond just taking a surface level scan of the text as its entire truth.

#psycholonials #vent #also if it matters this is coming from the perspective of a disabled bi person #not that it really does bc people aren't monoliths but y'know

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darlingandmreames · 4 years ago

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Here I am once again enabling your writing and being as selfish about it as every other time because is it really enabling if it’s done out or self indulgence??? ANYWAYS— dream husbands + (not so) fake marriage:

I have almost definitely said it before but by god I will say it again: the funniest possible way to do the whole “fake marriage” trope would be like two people getting married so they can invoke the spousal privilege that lets them refuse to testify against one another in court. a couple of mobsters sweating bullets in a vegas wedding chapel so they aren’t compelled to rat on each other when the next heist inevitably goes sour

I am absolutely in love with this concept and it’s 100% A Thing now asjdsfks You’re the best enabler a local trash goblin could ever dream of ^-^ so this 100% deserves a long fic full of mutual pining and the two of them being idiots and it’s definitely going to get one because I have zero self control, but here’s a short snippet about how it all started.......

*******************************************************************************************

Arthur leaned his head back against the cinder block wall with a frustrated sigh. This was bad. It certainly wasn’t the first time he’d ended up in police custody, but it was the first time he’d ended up in custody with actual decent evidence against him. Maybe even a prosecutable case. If he could get out he could maybe disappear- he’d gotten very good at that over the years- but he couldn’t make bail without accessing…less than legal funds, which would be more than enough for them to remand him. But if he couldn’t make bail, he’d be stuck in custody until court, and that would complicate things. And if this went to court, he wasn’t getting out of it. Not easily at least. He just hoped Eames had managed to get away without being caught; he knew Cobb had but he wasn’t so sure about Eames. Things would get even more complicated if they were both in custody. The sort of complicated that could get them both put away for a couple of decades if they weren’t careful.

He and Cobb hadn’t even supposed to end up in the states to begin with. Cobb was still very much a wanted man here, so it simply wasn’t an option. Canada was certainly a risk- the physical proximity and ease of extradition made Arthur nervous- but it had been a good sounding job. Easy sounding, with a good payout. It’d gone south though, both figuratively and literally, and when they’d found themselves in Chicago Arthur had scrambled for a way to get Cobb back out of the country undetected. Eames had thankfully been finishing up a job in the area and offered to help with documentation, but not before the authorities had caught wind of the situation. Cobb had thankfully managed to get out before the raid, but Arthur hadn’t quite been so lucky. The charges he’d been arrested on certainly hadn’t been the worst they could’ve been- mainly aiding and abetting, accessory, and fraud- but they weren’t great either. And unless he managed to somehow get out of this cell, he’d likely be facing time for them.

He was, quite simply, fucked.

“Come on.” The sound of the cell door being unlocked pulled Arthur from his thoughts. “You’ve made bail.”

He looked over, surprised. “I…did?”

“Yep. Your husband put it up.” The officer stared at him with a bored expression. “Now come on. Unless you’d rather stay.”

Husband? Arthur couldn’t fathom who the officer could’ve possibly been referring to, but he kept his expression neutral as he stood up and walked out of the cell into the hallway. He was certainly confused but he wasn’t an idiot; this wasn’t the time to look a gift horse in the mouth by asking questions. If it got him out of jail for the moment, he could work with it. He’d figure out the details later.

He stopped dead in his tracks as he walked into the jail lobby. Of all the people he thought he might’ve seen waiting for him, he certainly hadn’t expected it to be fucking Eames. There he was though, leaning against the lockers as casually as could be. He flashed a warm smile as he caught sight of Arthur and Arthur nodded slowly in return, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Bailing Arthur out put Eames at significant risk; Arthur knew full well he had several active warrants in the states. Unless he’d already been caught as well. But if that was the case, the most sensible thing for him to do was disappear, not get Arthur out of jail by pretending to be his fucking husband, which brought up a whole other set of questions on its own.

The officer behind the window slid him a bag filled with the belongings he’d had on him when he was arrested: wallet, keys, belt, notebook, three pens. No passport though. He frowned slightly at that; it wasn’t surprising, but it was annoying. He was going to have to use a different one to get out of the country anyways, but it would’ve been far easier if he’d had the original one as well. He sighed and collected his belongings, only half listening as the officer ran through the expectations for him while he was out on bail before walking over to where Eames was waiting by the door.

Eames leaned in and pulled Arthur into a quick hug, startling him. “Good to see you, darling. Glad I was able to get you out.”

“Right. Yes.” Arthur tried not to let his rapidly growing confusion show as Eames slipped his arm around his waist. “Good to…good to see you too.” He followed Eames out of the building, blinking in the sudden sunlight. They walked like that for several blocks, keeping up the appearance of whatever the fuck sort of cover Eames had gone with. It wasn’t until Arthur was confident that they were far enough away from the jail that they were likely only being watched from afar that he stopped, pulling away and finally letting his internal bewilderment creep into his expression. “Eames, what the fuck was that?”

“That was me getting you out of jail, darling, try to be at least a little appreciative. Though I’m sure I could return you if that’s what you’d prefer.”

Arthur stared at him. “What are you even still doing here?”

Eames grimaced, running a hand through his hair. “I got picked up too. They didn’t have quite enough to keep me in custody, but they managed to freeze most of my accounts and I’m pretty sure they have me under pretty close surveillance, so getting out of town is a tad difficult at the moment. Besides,” he shrugged, “I figured someone had to get you out of jail. And with Cobb jumping ship, that left me.”

“So you claimed to be my fucking husband?”

“Listen, I was just thinking ahead. We’re both stuck in this, at least for now, so I figured I’d get us some protection in case this got to court before we could get out of it.” He quirked an eyebrow. “They can’t make us testify against each other if we’re married. Spousal privilege and all. One of the few things you Americans do right.”

“Yes, thank you Eames, wonderful idea.” Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to wrap his mind around what Eames was telling him. He could already feel a migraine starting from the stress. This had already been an absolute fucking mess and Eames’ little ploy had just made it ten times worse. “Except for the fact that are aren’t actually married, which I’m sure will make us look great once the investigators find-”

“Yes we are.”

Arthur’s thoughts screeched to a halt and he looked up in confusion. “We’re what?”

“We’re married.”

He stared at Eames, dumbfounded. Was this what having a stroke felt like? Because that was clearly what he was having right now. “Eames, we’re not married.”

“Well, not technically, no. But I have all the necessary paperwork to argue to the contrary.” Eames shrugged. “I mean, it’s all forged of course, but as far as the US government is aware, you and I were legally married three years ago in England.” He gave Arthur an unimpressed look. “I know you don’t think highly of me, love, but you should at least give me enough credit to know I wouldn’t try pulling something like this off without the necessary paperwork backing it up.”

“Eames, we’re not married.”

“You and I know that but according to the authorities we are, so let’s try to keep it that way, yes? It’ll be better for both of us if we do.” Arthur continued to stare at Eames, trying desperately to think of something, anything, to say but drawing a blank instead. After a moment, Eames’ expression shifted to amusement. “Close your mouth, darling, or you’ll catch flies.”

Arthur snapped his mouth shut, pinching the bridge of his nose again. The beginnings of his headache came rushing back full force and he groaned. “I really hate you sometimes, you know that?”

Eames frowned. “Well that’s not a very nice way to talk to your very loving husband who just bailed you out of jail.”

“Eames, I swear to god…”

“Alright, alright, calm down, don’t have an aneurysm. Hopefully we’ll be able to get out of all of this before we really have to play that up. In the meantime, though,” Eames gave Arthur a somewhat sheepish smile, “I’m hoping you have a place here in Chicago, because I don’t and it might look a bit odd if we’re staying in separate hotels.”

Arthur sighed. “Yeah, I know a place.” It was technically one of Cobb’s apartments, but it would work well enough for them. It certainly wasn’t like Cobb was currently using it. He set off down the sidewalk. “I can’t believe you got us into this.”

“Technically it was Cobb who got us both into this lovely situation, darling, not me. I’m just trying to keep us both out of prison.”

Arthur groaned again. Christ, this was going to be a fucking mess.

#arthur x eames #arthur/eames #dream husbands #dreamhusbands #inception #arthur #eames #fake marriage au #it already has its own tag because I already know it's going to be A Thing asdjgfsjdk #asks #dbakeiro #prompts #local trash goblin writes stuff

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mediaevalmusereads · 3 years ago

Text

The Alienist. By Caleb Carr. New York: Random House, 1994.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Genre: historical fiction, mystery, suspense

Part of a Series? Yes, The Kreizler Series #1

Summary: The year is 1896. The city is New York. Newspaper reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned by his friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler—a psychologist, or “alienist”—to view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy abandoned on the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge. From there the two embark on a revolutionary effort in criminology: creating a psychological profile of the perpetrator based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who will kill again before their hunt is over.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content Warnings: ableism, homophobia/transphobia, racism (including slurs), sexism, rape, abuse, child abuse and sexual assault, child prostitution, animal cruelty, blood, gore, violence

Overview: This book has been on my TBR list for a while, so I figured I’d finally get around to reading it. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed the reading experience. Carr writes in a way that pretty closely imitates 19th century detective fiction, and while such a style might not be for everyone, I thought it went a long way in creating atmosphere. My criticisms have mostly to do with pace and the creative decisions that probably didn’t have to be made (such as depictions of child sexual assault, use of slurs, etc), but even with those faults, I have to give Carr’s craft and research a lot of credit, so this book gets 4 stars from me.

Writing: As I mentioned above, this book mimics detective fiction of the 19th century. If you’ve read any of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, you might get the idea: first person, characters displaying almost whimsical behavior, stuffed with contextual details that may or may not be relevant. At first, I thought the reading experience was going to be a slog, but once I realized what Carr was trying to do, I readjusted my expectations and found the prose to be quite engaging. If you like 19th century literature, you might appreciate what Carr does, but if you find older lit to be a challenge, this book might not be the thriller you’re hoping for.

That being said, I do think there were some areas where Carr could have picked up the pace or even cut some of the contextual details. It’s obvious that Carr did a lot of research before writing this book, and it’s understandable that he would want to show off some of that research, but there were times where I felt like it was a little much.

I also think there are a lot of things in this book that will offend modern sensibilities. I recall at least one use of the N-word (which is spoken by a racist minor character) as well as remarks that make it clear that characters think same-sex intimacy is “deviant” or abhorrent. I can understand why Carr put them in his book; if we’re trying to evoke an atmosphere and make the story feel like it’s set in the 19th century, it’s not realistic to expect everyone to be accepting of gay sex or treat POC with respect. But also, I think it’s on Carr to bear the responsibility of creating plot points and characters that have those attitudes in the first place. The character who uses the N-word could have easily not done so, and characters could have been more clear that their revulsion was at child prostitution rather than same-sex relationships.

Still, I was able to follow the plot with no problem and the sentences flowed in a way that made the reading experience feel quick (no 10-line sentences, thank god). So while there may be some things I would have liked to see adjusted to fit my own tastes, I think Carr did a wonderful job of making me feel like I was reading an older work.

Plot: The plot of this book follows a group of investigators as they try to use psychology to catch a serial killer. As far as being an “original” or unique thriller, this book doesn’t necessarily deliver a plot we haven’t seen before; but what made it so interesting (at least to me) was that it was less interested in the thrill of catching the killer and more interested in thinking through the “whys.” Why did the killer do X? Why did he do Y and Z when he could have done A or B? In this sense, the suspense doesn’t come from the action or the “chase,” but from the building of ideas and a foggy picture becoming more and more clear.

If I can fault Carr for anything, it’s that I think he crafted his mystery around some subjects that are... touchy (for lack of a better word). Most of the murder victims are children - specifically child prostitutes - and a lot of the killer’s motivations are rooted in some combination of racism and exposure to abuse. If you’re looking for a book which handles these issues with sensitivity, I think you’ll be disappointed. But I have to give Carr some credit for not overly sensationalizing these things; for example, while he did include characters who were racist towards Native Americans, he also included characters who were sympathetic and who insisted on not judging tribes for their defensive violence. Not everything is perfect, and there were some moments that made me uncomfortable, but I felt like Carr painted a complex picture of 19th century America, so I was able to keep going.

Characters: The plot of this book is told from the perspective of John Schuyler Moore - a newspaper reporter who teams up with his friend, eminent psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, to catch a serial killer. As a protagonist, Moore isn’t overly compelling - he’s more like a neutral, blank slate that the reader can project themselves onto. He serves much of the same function as Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories: to be a witness to other characters’ brilliance while occasionally making some helpful insights. Still, I didn’t outright hate Moore - he was kind and loyal, and I admired how he went out of his way to try to help people.

Kreizler, the psychologist (or “alienist” as they were called in those days), is somewhat of a Sherlockian character in that he’s eccentric, confident, and had abilities that stun the people around him. For the most part, Kreizler was fun to follow. I think the only times I got truly frustrated with him were when he would allude to some knowledge and then leave Moore in the dark - like “aha! This thing is obvious!” “What thing?” “No time to explain! I’ll tell you at dinner!” Those moments were a little irritating.

Sarah, the most prominent female character, was more complex than I expected her to be. She has clear career aspirations and doesn’t let anyone hold her back, and I liked that she was presented as this kick-ass woman who still felt human. She struggles when faced with the horrors of the murder, but she doesn’t let the horror put her off of her task. She’s confident and never seems to have a moment of self-doubt (which is refreshing). She notices interpersonal things without being boxed in as “the woman who notices emotions.” Granted, Sarah does serve some token function - she’s brought on in order to provide a “female perspective,” which was a little frustrating, but she held her own so well that my annoyance melted away.

Marcus and Lucius, the two brothers who work for the police department, are also quite charming characters. I loved how they brought technical expertise to the group by being knowledgeable about anatomy, fingerprints, photography, and the like, and I especially enjoyed the way they bickered with one another. Their presence immediately made scenes feel lighter, and they brought something of a family aspect to the whole band.

Supporting characters were well-crafted in that no two felt quite the same. Teddy Roosevelt (yes, that one) was cheerful and warm while still demanding absolute cooperation and loyalty from his men. Cyrus and Stevie - two of Kreizler’s employees - were charming, though I wish Cyrus had gotten to do more than just kind of silently stand by awaiting orders. Mary - Kreizler’s maid - was a lovely character, and I appreciated the positive disability representation we got with her, though I do not like how her character arc ended and how it related to the main plot. The crime bosses were intimidating without feeling too much like stock characters, the thugs did their job. I don’t think there was a character that was poorly written, just characters who served purposes that may or may not have been needed.

As for the murderer... we don’t get to see him very much, but I felt like I got to know him because so much of the book was focused on mapping out his life and psychology. It worked much better than books where the antagonist is looming off to the side, acting as a vaguely threatening force but not really a character, and one that doesn’t even show up until the last quarter of the book. When the killer finally does appear on page, I felt like he had been involved in the story, even without being physically present, so I was able to accept him as an active force on the narrative, not just a surprise twist at the end.

TL;DR: The Alienist is a well-crafted mystery that uses atmosphere and psychology to create an engaging mystery. While some readers may struggle with the period-like prose or the more disturbing aspects of the story, Carr creates a compelling narrative by focusing on understanding and knowledge over spectacle and action, and by using well-developed characters.

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chaotichedonist · 4 years ago

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Tharunka (Kensington, NSW : 1953 - 2010)

Wednesday 9 June 1976, page 14

Some funny moments to tease you into reading:

Press: Roger, you're noted for your amazing screams.

Freddie: It's a controlled scream. I'd rather call it art.

Freddie: You're joking dear. I'm just a singer, dear.

It’s been a struggle, because in the beginning nobody knew what we were doing. We were the only people who believed in ourselves.

back at the hotel sleazy

For all those fans who were misled by the media, Queen did not spend a couple of days-relaxing on sunny Perth beaches - it rained the whole bloody time they were there. (In Melbourne the hotel was 'besiged' by fans, who to quote Pete Brown — Queen's personal manager — seemed to be emerging from the wood work). Not to be put off however, by the Australian conditions Freddie Mercury (lead vocals and keyboards) attended the press conference in white pants and a simply sumptuous summer synthetic top with delicate butterfly sleeves curling gently over his shoulders. He was even more beautiful than Sophia Loren.

They were all quite chatty only Roger (Meadows-Taylor, the drummer) would keep interjecting, usually over John Deacon (bass) who said not an audible word.

Press: Would you describe your music as mock opera?

Freddie: They call it cock-opera back home.

Roger: I suppose because the vocals are in the 'grand style'.

Press: When is your next album coming out?

Freddie: We'll have a rest and think about it..

Roger: We just don't bung'em together.

Brian: We don't sort of write sitting in hotel rooms you know.

Freddie: We gather influences.

Press: Your music has been described as snob rock. What do you think?

Freddie: I couldn't describe our music as anything. We certainly don't put across that this it intelligent music that is on a completely differenrt level to the people who come to it.

Roger: It's written for the people. That's what it's all about.

Press: The theme of death recurs on your albums. Why this preoccupation?

Roger: Freddie's morbid mind.

Press to Freddie: Do you consider yourself a sex-symbol?

Freddie: You're joking dear. I'm just a singer, dear.

Press to Roger: Do you consider yourself a superstar?

Roger: As meaningless, (blows kisses).

Roger on the media - absurd for a magazine combine rock and politics.

Press: Roger, you're noted for your amazing screams.

Freddie: It's a controlled scream. I'd rather call it art.

Undauted by the fearless Australians they continued talking about their lyrics and the esoteric implication.

Roger: Freddie just loves the word 'Beelzebub'.

Freddie: Yes, well, Brian's got a taste for unusual words.

Roger: You talking about dandling on your knee and things?

All four of them write songs and each has at least one song on 'A Night At The Opera'.

Brian: It's very difficult to talk about our songs as a group because we all have different ideas of what the songs are about.

Roger: No we don't.

Freddie: Roger's the sensitive one. 'I'm in love with my car' is the most sensitive song on the album (Night At The Opera).

Roger did tend to sit there pouting at the bows on his pink lame gym-boots. One hardly noticed the dark roots in this gold angelic hair. We did ask, but unfortunately Roger didn't have a pic of himself in the gymboots. Roger was later accosted by David Essex fans in the foyer of the hotel, who wished to know if he was a popstar, girls now have Roger's autograph. Back to the lyrics..

Freddie: Every song is written by one of us and means something special to each one of us. Certain songs have a very literal meaning and can be understood straight away. Then there are some songs that can be taken on a lot of different levels.

He describes a lot of his songs as fantasies. 'We want to consciously lose ourselves. There are certain things we want to escape from in our lives or whatever.' He feels that people should create their own private fantasies from the images in his songs and so doesn't like to talk about what they mean to him. 'I'd hate to shatter someone's illusion. If I listen to somebody's songs I conjure up a fantasy of what its about and I like to keep it that way.'

He elaborated further.. 'Lyrically it is helpful to use certain words. You see it depends.. sometimes I want to use words that are phonetically useful. In the beginning they're surface words but you entwine them into the meaning of a song. That's what I mean about different levels.'

Brian May has a different approach to his songs, 'There's usually something serious behind them, but I feel a big responsibility not to over-indulge in idealogies. In 'White Queen' I was very interested in the significance of Queens and White Ladies in English folk lore. The song started off as a personal experience, the frustration of not being able to communicate, I was thinking about Robert Graves' ' White Goddess' and that became involved in the song.'

Roger: Romantic slush.

Brian: Our 'Now I'm Here' song is really about our first American tour. A big experience for anybody. It's a conglomeration of all the experiences we had on that tour. We had a great time with Mott the Hoople. I suppose they taught us to be a touring band.

We're very critical about each other and very cynical. We don't get deeply into meanings because you're living with it all the time. You have to be a bit light-hearted about it.

With four individual writers the albums were not done with a specific concept in mind. The 'White Queen' was written four years before the 'Black Queen'.

Brian: I don’t think that Freddie’s 'Black Queen' was a reaction to the 'White Queen'. We just discovered that we had these songs and the rest of the album seemed to fit around it.

Freddie: It probably subconsciously coheres.

Similarly ‘A night At The Opera’ has no overall concept though the name of the album is related to Freddie’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

As Brian puts it ‘We are four very different people with four very different directions, but there is a musical development that does make some kind of sense. Queen is very much an independent thing. We are always bouncing ideas off each other. We are very aware that we need each other.’

The rapport between them onstage bears out this statement. They work off each other in a carefully intergrated show thatt creates an atmosphere of spontaneity for the audience.

At the opening of their set there is a flash of fire and smoke as Queen emerge on stage. While music winds up they launch into ‘Orge Battle’. Like a Greek God or a simister Mephistopheles Freddie's powerful vocals cut through the smoke and flames.

With the stage show the band is doing something different to stimulating their records. Brian: "You don't get up there and behave like you do in the street. You go up there to entertain people and give them some kind of excitement". They have rearranged some of their songs especially for stage performance, including a medley of 'Bohemian Rhapsody', 'Killer Queen', 'Black Queen' and 'Leyroy Brown', which grinds down into 'March of the Black Queen' and then skips out on a lighter note which features Brian on genuine Japanese ukalele.

The brilliant solo Brian performs in 'Brighton Rock', with sweet high Paginini frills and harmonies, stimulating two or three guitars on stage, is in a style he has evolved himself. He got the idea the first time he was in a recording studio. Says Brian: "It was my first experience of doing multi-tracking. It happened to be in the cannon-things which repeat themselves. You play one, then you play the same over the top of it after a time interval. Later we started to do those things on stage but there was the problem of how to do it. We started having a single delay and then another one over the top of it. Then afterwards you do another repeat on the second. You can then do three part harmonies with yourself. We started to base it all on ten second solos and it grew and grew. There's a lot of other people doing it now and I'm glad because it’s a thing you can play around with.'

In the stage arrangement of "Prophet's Song' Freddie uses a similar echo feedback system which multiplies his voice into a celestial choir. His voice floats as a vision - "Listen to the madman' - while Brian plays some beautiful guitar.

encore amore

Brian describes their encore performance as the time when the band really unwinds. "It's nice at the encore to just completely unbend and make a fool of yourself. It gets rid of the tension between the band and the audience. I used to get a kick out of going to concerts to see rock groups like the 'Who' and feeling involved, like the group knew you were there. WE go by the kinds of things we think people would like at an encore. It's at a very basic level really, an energy level, a physical level. Rock and Roll is kind of a body music. I get as much satisfaction out of basic rock'n'roll like Status Quo as the most sophisticated music I know.'

The audience certainly enjoyed it and really let loose their energy. Roger (who claimed the most female screams) in rainbow mop-wig opened the encore with slow heavy rock-beat as Freddie did a dramatic entrance in a silk kimino. As he eased into 'Big Spender', he peeled off to striped hot pants for an outrageous version of 'Jailhouse Rock' - simple hard-driving rock'n'roll that had everybody out of their sets.

gettin' feelin' thru th' transistors

Brian was rather upset that the Australian Press should braiid them as a manufactured band. If 'Bohmeian ,hapsody' can be seen as incorporating the spectrum of s talent - mood changes, heavy stuff, the soft ballad - it is not because they (men of letters from universities) have developed a magic 'X' formula. Rather the song can be seen as a musical progression, a reworking of motifs off their other albums.

Brian can only say that, 'They obviously didn't see us in the earlier days. I can understand why they'd say that over here. Big impact. Overnight success. It must have been all calculated. If you’d seen the way it happened in England, you wouldn’t think that. I’ve had years playing pubs in England where people were drinking beer and discussing what other people were doing and not listening to the music. I want to build up this thing where people do want to go to a concert. While it begins to look like the commercial side, it;s what it’s all about. I want knock it because I want people to come and hear what we do.

It’s been a struggle, because in the beginning nobody knew what we were doing. We were the only people who believed in ourselves. We started playing because we had some kind of vision that we thought was worthwhile. For over a year and a half we were playing to ourselves. Gradually you gather people around who believe and that’s the way it happened.

Nobody is going to tell us to play what is commercial. What we play comes from us. We’re very lucky really in that we have a kind of audience who are attentive to whatever direction we choose to follow. One of us will come up with a song and we'll say, 'Yeah, it needs that kind of treatment and maybe that turns out to be something you call heavy and sometimes something which is light.'

To get back to the charge that they are a manufactured band, while he doesn't like it, he can only take it as a compliment that they think the band is so good. He doesn't consider himself a technician "technically I've stayed the same for the last six or seven years. Progress is what you feel and what you are putting across. That's what playing is about for us.'

Freddie: There's a lot of music there too.

Roger: A bit of music, yeah.

low key queen

By Anne Finnegan

Wednesday 9 June 1976

If you save, do not forget to leave a link to this, coz i kinda found it by myself and made and transcipt. Thanks :)

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edweenie · 4 years ago

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"If you want something done, you gotta do it yourself" -Me, while writing RiDe fluff until 3am

Richtofen gazed upon the castle that he grew to enjoy over the past few months. At first he was a little hesitant about being here, but as time went by, he actually had ended up enjoying it- well, as much as he could, anyway. Other than the typical zombie hoards and the constant gnawing of hunger in his stomach, the trip to Austria hadn’t been so bad overall. Though, the cold nights were also a pain in the-

“Hey, Doc?”

Richtofen spun around to the sound of the familiar voice of his American friend.

“What is it, Dempsey?”

“Did I interrupt you muttering to yourself?”

Richtofen crossed his arms.

“I may have a couple loose screws, but I definitely don’t talk to myself!”

Tank rolled his eyes, a slight smile on his face.

“I don’t!”

The Marine ignored him. “Anyways, Doc. You told me we could talk later, so…” Tank raised his eyebrows. “...Now’s a good time?”

Damn it. That’s right.

Dempsey’s been asking to talk to the German for close to a week now, and every effort has been in vain. Richtofen was terrified of the Marine, however, it never used to be like this. Ever since, back in Germany, he’d catch himself starring for a second too long, or his stomach turning when he walked past and was able to get a subtle whiff of the American man’s unique scent. And he hoped to God he didn’t remember when Tank had kissed him on the cheek that one time they all got a tad intoxicated…

He didn’t want Dempsey to notice how he has been acting, though he probably already did. This ‘talk’ is probably Dempsey telling Richtofen to back off. To not be so creepy. He didn’t know what suddenly had gotten a hold of him. It was not like the German to grow feelings for someone, especially so soon. After all, this isn’t highschool. There’s no time or place for puny little crushes.

“Nein, Dempsey. I’m an extremely busy man. Please, go bother Takeo.”

Richtofen made a shooing motion with his hand and proceeded to walk in the opposite direction.

“Oh, come the hell on, Richtofen!”

Tank picked up a wad of snow before packing it into a ball and throwing it towards the Germans back. Without even a flinch after hitting him spot on, Richtofen’s figure slowly faded into the distance, while Tank stood there with his arms crossed, kicking the snow on the ground.

“He can be such a little bastard. Who does he think he is, acting all high and mighty when…” Tank cupped his hands around his mouth. “EVERYBODY HERE HATES HIM!” he yelled.

*Later That Night*

The fire felt so warm against the pale skin of the doctor…

This was always the most peaceful time, when they’d all gather around the fire and eat together, clean their guns, and sometimes talk over the events of the day. Nikolai and Dempsey would always have something to say, whether it was them complaining about the meal or arguing about who killed more zombies. Once you looked past the annoyance of the two, Richtofen and Takeo found themselves, more often than not, chuckling at their behavior.

“...and then there came out big Russian bear- at least nine feet tall, with razor sharp claws.”

“What’d you do, Nik? Climb up his back and slit his throat?” Dempsey questioned, sarcasm in his voice as if he didn’t believe the story to begin with.

“Not even close! I kept him as pet.” Nikolai said, matter-of-factly.

The three chuckled.

“I don’t know why you laugh, this is true story. I had him for three years.”

“Okay, Nik. Whatever you say.”

They continued eating among the warmth of the fire, sprouting comments here and there.

Dempsey sat up and stretched, overexaggerating his groan.

“Well, friends, I think I’m gonna turn in for the night.” He said, walking away from the group. “If you need me, don’t.”

After some more time by the fire, the other three men decided to rest as well. Richtofen cleaned all of the cans up while Nikolai and Takeo put out the fire and made sure everything was back in place.

“I’ll talk to you two tomorrow,” Richtofen said, waving goodnight.

“Goodnight, doctor.” Takeo waved.

Richtofen stood by his door, hands on his hips.

“Do you think it’s funny, American? Do you think it’s funny to annoy me?”

Tank sat there, at the doctors own desk, leaning back in his chair and looking up at him with raised eyebrows and his right leg casually crossed over his left.

“Do you think it’s funny to constantly blow me off?”

Richtofen let out a single and exaggerated ‘ha’.

“Blow you off? Americans can be so daft! I told you I was busy. Why don’t you run off to bed like you said you were going to, hm? Or does the big bad Marine need to be tucked in?”

“I ain’t going anywhere until you talk to me.”

“Get out before you really piss me off!”

Tank sat up and began to raise his voice. “Talk to me before you piss me off!”

Richtofen kicked the desk.

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?” he practically screamed, his voice echoing throughout the stone walls.

Tank sat there, looking up at the German’s bulging veins and red face.

“Why are you so angry?” Tank questioned, almost in a whisper. “I just wanted to talk to you.” the American stood up, moving so fast the chair behind him fell backwards. “No wonder nobody here trusts you.” and with that, Tank walks past the German while purposely shoving him with the side of his body.

Richtofen sighed. He’d been tossing and turning for hours. Though struggling with insomnia is a normal occurrence for the doctor, this time was different. He genuinely felt bad for the American. He slowly sat up and began putting on his boots. He knew where Tank normally slept, so he decided to take a walk and ‘accidentally’ run into his sleeping quarters, (with the subtle hopes of him being asleep so he didn’t have to face the man.)

But sure enough, as he walked by the small cell that Dempsey made his cozy living space, he was wide awake, leaned back against the wall with a freshly lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

Richtofen laughed awkwardly. “Couldn’t sleep either?”

Dempsey slowly exhaled a cloud of smoke. “I slept fine. Just woke up outta nowhere.”

Richtofen started walking closer, eventually stopping about five feet away from his comrade and taking a seat. He sighed, “Look, Demps-”

“I get it, Doc.”

Richtofen looked up at him, puzzled.

“Excuse me?”

“I get it. You’re stressed, you’re confused. You’re under a lot of pressure, and I get it.” Tank took another slow inhale of the cigarette, then proceeded to blow out the smoke. Richtofen’s eyes lit up. “De-”

“But don’t you dare take that frustration out on me for wanting to talk to you.”

Richtofen sighed and looked down at his legs. He was truly ashamed for the way he’d been acting, but he could never in a million years tell Tank why.

Dempsey gestured at the cigarette. “Need a puff?”

“No, thank you.” Richtofen said, twiddling with his thumbs. “I am… truly sorry.” He looked up at the American and met eyes with him. “Truly, truly sorry, Dempsey.”

The Marine smirked and stuck the cigarette into the concrete, tossing the butt to the side.

“I’m free now, if you’d like to talk,” he said, chuckling awkwardly again.

Tank exhaled.

“I just wanted to tell you…”

Richtofen clenched. Here we go. The American’s bright blue eyes met Richtofen's soft green ones, as he met him with a delicate smile.

“I’ve seen how hard you’re working to keep us all on the right track. We’ve all noticed. Whether we trust you or not, that’s another thing. But don’t think we don’t see how much you try…” Tank crossed his arms. “But don’t think I’ve gone soft on ya. I just dont want me to be the one you murder when you turn your back on us.” He winked, and Richtofen chuckled.

“If I were to murder anyone, it’d be that damned Nikolai.”

“Is that a promise, Doc?”

“Oh, it’s a swear.”

They both chuckled, and Richtofen began to feel uneasy, remembering the whole reason he was scared to communicate with Dempsey in the beginning. The feelings were inappropriate… and they were beginning to creep up on the German again. Richtofen hastily got up and began to dust himself off, “Well, nice talk, thank you for your words, but I should really get to bed.”

Tank got up too. “I don’t think you’ll have much time to sleep.” he yawned.

“Ah, it’s always like this.”

Tank slowly stepped in and wrapped his arms around the tired German’s neck, squeezing him almost too hard and practically forcing Richtofen forward. The German, at that moment, was flooded with more emotions than he ever had felt before. What is going on with Dempsey?

Now that Richtofen thought about it, ever since he’d taken the other Dempsey’s soul, he had started acting strange. After the initial cold shoulder towards the German, he almost began acting as if he cares less about what happens to him… like he’d already accepted this was his fate. No- this was not their fate. They would live to see a better tomorrow. Richtofen finally hugged Tank back, even tighter. He ignored the voices in his head telling him he was making a mistake. He needed this, and Dempsey needed this too. He practically felt tears forming in the corner of his eyes. “We will make it out of here, Dempsey. You just have to…” Richtofen choked back the tears that needed so desperately to flow. “...trust me.”

Tank squeezed tighter.

“I’ll trust you.”

#edward richtofen #tank dempsey #richtofen x dempsey #call of duty #cod #cod zombies #call of duty zombies #my art #ive never posted a fic before #but my arts been trash so i was like FRICK this lets just write

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popsiclemania · 4 years ago

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My 2020 in K dramas (+1 J drama)

I began watching k-dramas in 2018 but I’ve never watched as many shows, Korean or otherwise, as I have in this one. 2020 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I think what helps me really enjoy this over Bollywood+Malayalam+ American pop culture I grew up with is that a smirk on the wrong character’s face doesn’t make me seethe with rage and want to burn everything down. It’s not like growing up with SRK on screen and then having SRK wannabes leave you with lifelong trauma in reality. I can just move on. It’s removed enough from my everyday life but still familiar in a generic Asian family way. Does that make sense? It’s not perfect and it’s not free of its own harmful stereotypes and narratives, but there’s enough of the good stuff to make you stick around. This year I fell in love with Nana, Kim Hye Soo, Han Yeri, Park Eun bin, Ahn Eun jin, Kim Bum, Kim Yong ji, Flower Boy’s Go Dok Mi and Search:WWW’s Bae Tami. Cancelled Ji Chang wook (bye). Desperately missed Kim Jae Wook. Had thoughts on Hwang In Yeop, which were mostly heart eyes. Discovered J dramas and fell in love with Cherry Magic’s Adachi.

My year-in-review below:

LOVED

Into The Ring - I am so glad I saved this for a rainy day because it’s exactly the kind of upright citizen shenanigans my unemployed ass needed at the end of the year.

Goo Se Ra thinks the govt should work for the people but that doesn’t mean her own moral compass always points north. Her purpose is to make steady money, and I love seeing her go hard to survive and cobble together what she needs. The thing that really works for me is that she wants to be good, but she isn’t always. And you get to see her be disappointed, upset, embarrassed and hurt from being publicly kicked in the gut as she navigates a job where she appears, on the surface, to be a supremely confident, self-serving, accidental politician. What you see as her naiveté is mostly just her being a regular person in an environment dictated by backhand deals and rich people politics. She gets hit again and again, and you see what it does to her sense of worth to get back up again, how she grapples with her self. And through all this the show is funny?! Se Ra is what writers of manic pixie characters think they are doing and not doing at all. Love her friends, and Jang Hye-jin is *chef’s kiss*!

Hyena - Kim Hye Soo’s Jung Geum Ja is perhaps Se Ra’s older and darker contemporary. Geum Ja is a survivor and will get what she wants and where she wants to, however many hells she has to cross. She’s single-minded about her success, ruthless and has no qualms about bending morals to get the outcome she needs. She’ll never compromise on who she is or justify how she lives, can build people up and also tear them down, but she also knows care and kindness.

I turned to Signal for more Kim Hye Soo but was disappointed in how the first few episodes seemed to shortchange her. May try again in 2021.

(Highly recommend @saltr0se’s fic series which just GETS Geum Ja so well. Fic writers are the best)

Search: WWW (Finished in 2020) - It took me half a year to finish this. I started watching Search in Oct 2019 and raced through the first 6 episodes because I couldn’t take my eyes off the rollercoaster of Bae Tami’s life. And then I had to take a break because it was a little too close to the frenetic pace of my own industry. As @drivingsideways wrote, a lot of Search is premised around ‘patriarchy? who dat?’, which is why watching its politics play out is so fascinating. It’s also deliciously turmoil-y to watch a very clear-sighted, weathered Tami put on rose-tinted glasses for her romance and then frequently peer over them to evaluate whether it could actually meld into her life.

Catch The Ghost - Kim Seonho oozes charm and perhaps Startup was a showcase of how effectively he can be a typical male lead. But Catch is exactly not that. Go Jiseok and Yoo Ryeong have moulded their lives around to meet their most desperate wishes in life and in the process also left parts of themselves untended. There is guilt, pain and need. Now guess who will tend to whose wounds? Their dynamic is electric even when the central mystery flags towards the last few episodes of the show. I really hope Moon Geun Young is doing well and gets more amazing roles soon. She is so good here.

(Highly recommend @melonatures‘s fic for putting that sizzling on-screen chemistry into words. HOW?!) Cherry Magic - Stories about painfully awkward people are my jam and Eiji Akaso gets Adachi’s shy, nervy energy so right. Cherry Magic is straight up just 12 hours of 🥺🥺🥺.

Stranger/Secret Forest - I’ve been devouring the entirety of Agatha Christie’s work this year after Stranger reminded me how comforting murder mysteries can be. I love Bae Doona. I also love characters who don’t get social norms, not always because they are out to flout them but because that’s just not how their mind/brain works. (have to watch S2)

Flower Boy Next Door - Honestly, the opening scene introducing Park Shin Hye’s character Go Deok Mi sold me on this immediately. An introverted, penny pinching copy editor living alone and working from home thanks to extreme social anxiety? Love. All the side characters are a lot of fun and I’ve never loved Kim Seulgi and Go Kyung Pyo more. It’s a warm show, slowly rounding off the sharp edges of every character.

JUST FUN

The Spies Who Loved Me - It’s been a year of disappointing rom-coms and Spies kind of quietly turned it around for me. I want to be the fly on Yoo In Na’s wall as she figures how to play her characters. I’ve only seen her in 3 roles but somehow she always manages to be in character arcs that don’t short change her. Spies could’ve been and sometimes is the regular heterosexual fare, but In Na ups the ante over and over again, coming out on top as the smartest person in the room.

ENJOYED WITH *RESERVATIONS*

I have to watch A Piece Of Your Mind again because I don’t understand how Jung Hae In and Chae Soo bin built SO MUCH warmth and crackling chemistry with barely a kiss. I was iffy about how the whole AI thing started off and the tortured musician plotline (angsty male artists will forever be an eyeroll for me).

Park Min Young is a queen who never disappoints and When The Weather Is Nice is everything you want in a winter romance. My reservation was in how they explore so much of domestic abuse and the complex ways its traumatised the women in this family. I’m ok with the characters having imperfect ways of processing and understanding the violence, I welcome it. I’m not ok with the show dancing around whether the pivotal crime was justified/ self defence (it was).

A lot of dramas did this. I loved Han Yeri and Choo Ja Hyun in My Unfamiliar Family, I didn’t like the free pass the show gave their dad’s abusive character.

Hwang Jung Eum’s comedy style is generally not my thing but she was pretty great in Mystic Pop-UP Bar. But I’m side-eyeing the sanctity surrounding motherhood. Maybe I should read more about babies and Korean folklore.

Hospital Playlist was my comfort watch through June and July. I think its wholesomeness and non-plot writing came at a good time for me. But I noticed then that the throughline for all main characters was moral superiority and hence what I then saw as *wholesomeness*. It’s kind of what makes it a grating rewatch in parts. Plus the real life of misogyny of Yoo Yeon Seok makes me want to push his angelic catholic character off a cliff. (For context, i was raised catholic). I want to continue loving Chae Song Hwa, and for that the showrunners need to stop cornering her with overbearing romantic interests (let that woman breathe! she literally ran away to another city!)

Hospital is good at creating moments of comfort, so much so that I went to watch Reply 1988 after it, but had to drop it coz I couldn’t get into it. Maybe I’ll come back to it next year.

Once Again is what I call joint family propaganda. What it does well is lay bare the mechanics of living in a society that prizes the heterosexual family structure, the loops you have to jump through to hide when you break its rules and what happens when you are found out. I love the characters, their fights, their frustrations. I just don’t love the validation of joint families. (context: i grew up in an oppressive joint family lol). In my au, Nahee and Gyujin don’t get married again or immediately have children, but take the long route to figuring out how to love the person the other is. Gahee is openly dating Hyo shin and her parents have to figure out how to process her success and her romance. Young dal and Ok boon have to learn to stop dictating their children’s lives. Joon sun runs his company from home, so his wife Hyun kyung can work on what she wants. Choyeon, Joori and Ga-yeon go back to being flamboyant AF and the market learns to not judge. Gyujin and Jaesok have to actually work on the relationship with their mother and what sent her into depression. Just a lot of learning involved.

Just Between Lovers was a nice watch, i just don’t get how Kang doo and Ha Moon So’s relationship will survive his constantly simmering anger.

Crash Landing on You was so much fun until the main romance turned angsty, but it gave us North Korean soldier shenanigans and the epic romance of Seo Dan and Alberto Gu that we needed more of.

Tale of The Nine Tailed is probably what Goblin wished it was. I, however, will never be over Lee Rang. (Also, when can gods stop meeting their love interests as babies? Asking for my sanity)

I literally ignored everything in Oh My Ghost except Park Bo Young and Kim Seulgi and it was amazing.

NOPE

Goblin, Dinner Mate, Oh My Baby and My Secret Romance were a whole lot of NO, NAHI, ILLAAA.

I loved hate-watching The King:Eternal Monarch with the rest of k drama tumblr but someone please take away Kim Eun-sook’s access to gigantic budgets and all-star casts.

It was painful to watch Do You Like Brahms squander away its potential but I’m glad to be introduced to Park Eun bin. Age of Youth is next on watchlist.

More than Friends to me is only Ahn Eun jin. Someone give her amazing lead roles asap.

Why did Record of Youth do that to Park So Dam and her clothes? Just why

WANTED TO WATCH, BUT COULDN’T BECAUSE *INTENSE*

World Of The Married, It’s Okay Not To Be Okay, Sweet Home, Extracurricular, Penthouse, Flower of Evil, Lie After Lie

WILL WATCH NEXT YEAR

SF8, Stove League, Birth Care Centre but I’ll start the new year with School Nurse Files coz it looks very good.

#long post #kdramas #review #2020 #A DECADE #Goo Sera’s and Yoo Ryeong’s are the kinds of stories I wish I’d watched through my late teens/early 20s #Jung Geum Ja and Bae Tami are who I’m taking into my thirties.

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fmdduri · 3 years ago

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a headcanon about duri & titan’s title tracks.

word count: 2,422. about: this is how duri feels about each title track of titan’s thus far. duri also very much saying he doesn’t like a song because people work hard,, but you can’t help what you don’t like, right? notes: don’t perceive me for some of this, thank you <3 i believe i did this on duri’s old blog as well but this is all new information !

btd: duri believes that btd (before the dawn) was a rather strong debut song. it showed off titan’s concept rather well, as well as cementing titan as a strong group in vocals, rapping, and dancing - no matter what position you have in the group. btd is definitely a song that still holds up to this day, one that duri really enjoys. however, attached to btd is also the criticism that duri faced about not fighting titan’s concept and saying that he was simply only there due to be a very strong vocalist, especially for the age that he debuted at. nonetheless, god tier debut.

be mine: this was a rather strong comeback song, duri believes. everything about it was rather smooth and he thinks it really showed off titan being a strong group together, once again. even though his styling gave very, your high school boyfriend who fell into the category of emo trying to be some sort of rock god - it did manage to work with the whole mysterious concept of titan. however, duri does prefer btd over be mine, if he had to be honest. duri, yet again, faced comments about not belonging in titan due to the concept and his own image, saying that he was really only there to carry vocally.

paradise: duri likes to forget his hair exists in this. however, it’s clear their producer is truly iconic, especially with something like this. this song tends to remind duri of the 90s songs that he had really enjoyed, but clearly with a more modern push upon it. he wasn’t entirely sure why they spent a lot of the time in a train, but it’s fine, whatever. this is also one of the songs that comments towards duri in the concept had gotten better, but they just weren’t all the way there just yet. but, it was looking up now.

the chaser: probably his favorite of their older songs, as well as really being the song to cement titan as legends in the industry. while duri never fully watched the music video due to the fact that a car accident occurs in the music video (that he didn’t watch while on set, granted he had to walk away from the flipped car at some point, he held up pretty well), it’s still generally one of his favorites. still kind of frustrating though that titan went through all of that in the music video, only for them to not even open the box in end, even though they had the key. this was the comeback that had also solidified duri fitting into titan’s concept. so, it was all around really positive for him and one of the songs he still really loves to perform. this just truly showed how incredible he is with stage presence and something that continued to carry throughout his career. however, the only negative was duri being faced with underaged sexualization because you could see his arms through the mesh shirts he was styled in for music shows.

destiny: another song that is 100% one of their best, at least in duri’s opinion. he really enjoys destiny, the music video itself, and the dancing as well. generally, he just believes that it’s a really good song and something that’s really fun to perform. destiny really just is that girl and there’s nothing else that can be said about it. she’s just sitting very pretty in titan’s discography.

fanfare: to put it simply, this is one of duri’s least favorite titan songs. he finds the beat of the song to be rather odd, to the point that he wasn’t entirely sure how to really sing it at first. also, the “la la las” in the chorus were rather odd as well and he didn’t get it. kind of wishes it wasn’t in the discography. he seemingly just felt awkward in this song.

roar: roar just feels like a continuation of fanfare, with that odd beat that occurred. he really can’t say he even understands why that became such a trend with the last two releases. again, the “la la las” in the chorus is just something that he can’t seem to really get behind. essentially was a fanfare 2.0 and it would be better if this didn’t take up space in their discography.

easy love: easy love... she’s just that girl and you can’t say anything bad about her. this is a song that duri really, really likes from titan’s discography. this is another song that he enjoys performing from their older discography. he really likes the genre it falls in, the beat, and the choreography. after the chaser, this is the second song to really prove that duri does fit into titan’s concept, as well as solidified him even more as a force to be reckoned with in the industry.

last romeo: last romeo definitely falls into the extraordinary part of titan’s discography with btd, the chaser, be mine, paradise, and destiny. they found themselves going back to the older vibes of your emo rock boyfriends, but they really just made that styling work. he can’t say anything bad about last romeo either, he really likes her. sure, the music video is a bit odd, but she’s fun!

back: truth be told, duri probably didn’t fit this concept at all. but, gaia and netizens thought he fit really well, and maybe he just ended up being a rather good actor. this is a song that falls into the extraordinary part of titan’s discography as well. it’s very much god tier with the chaser and destiny. but, in general, he enjoyed this one a lot.

call me baby: this seemingly marked a shift in titan’s sound, as well as rounding out their concept to be even bigger than it was. it still fed a bit into the mysterious heartthrobs in a way, but was also a bit brighter. duri also likes this type of genre a lot, so he really had a lot of fun with call me baby. this was also shaping to him really, really fitting into titan’s concepts and being able to put himself into multiple different concepts of music videos. really just the type of song to shake your ass to!

love me right: the electronic and r&b genre is something that duri really enjoys, which makes love me right go pretty high up on the list of favorite titan title tracks. he gave him that early 2000s boy group that he truly wishes he was because of how much he really enjoys songs from the 90s and early 200s. he felt a little bit cool in the football uniforms as well, even though he doesn’t no one thing about american football in the slightest. but, he looked cool, so that was great.

sing for you: sing for you is probably one of duri’s all time favorite title tracks. however, that probably more so has to do with the fact that it’s one of titan’s ballad title tracks and duri is very much a ballad singer, which definitely shows within this titan release. there’s something rather comforting about the song and the melody that it holds. he really can’t say anything bad about the song at all, and it’s really just a perfect winter song, that’s for sure.

monster: a song that falls into the their more “funky” songs, but it’s something that works really well. duri quite enjoys this song, and holds one of his most iconic lines in a titan song of “creepin’, creepin’, creepin’.” monster is definitely a song that duri wouldn’t ever get tired of, and a song that he really enjoys/enjoyed performing, to say the least. the styling of monster also one hundred brought back the emo wannabe rockstar boyfriends, but it worked really well, so that counted the most. definitely a heartthrob song for sure.

lucky one: probably one of titan’s weirdest music videos, to say the least. the creepy, lifeless stares that they had to do was very chilling to have to see. but, besides for the rather odd music video, she’s a very fun song! following the funkiness again, but it also just works really well. the choreography is a bit odd, mainly because of the head bopping. but, other than that, she’s a very, very good song that duri quite likes. he remembers not having to work out on this filming day because of the amount of running that went on.

lotto: she’s definitely your best friend’s sexy older sibling. while she relies very heavy on autotune for the purpose of the beat and everything else about the song, she really wasn’t that hard to sing on stage. it also didn’t diminish titan’s talents in anyway, even though so people like to drag them for using autotune - duri still really likes the song because it just works so well. plus, he also did feel a bit sexy in this music video because of the cocky attitude he had to portray for some of his parts.

kokobop: this song means a lot to duri, simply because bc entertainment had picked his lyrics for this song. he wrote the title track completely on his own, so he’s probably a bit bias to the song as a whole, but it is one of his favorites, and would even consider it one of their god tier songs - but, that might just be because he wrote the song and he had fun with the song, it went over rather well as well. though, of course, he had to explain a few times that kokobop means “fun dancing” and also comes from the 1959 hit song “shimmy shimmy ko-ko-bop” by little anthony and the imperials. he’s really proud of this song, and it’s something for the girls and gays to shake their asses to in the summer!

power: probably titan’s most hated song and duri holds a rather unpopular opinion about the song. he likes this song, a lot actually. he thinks the song and performance is a lot of fun. yes, maybe he did get to be the hero in the music video and beat the big robot with the shield he created through the music video. but, still, it was a very fun song that he really likes! he likes fun! he likes to have fun!

universe: this is another song that duri really likes, however, it’s most likely because it falls within the genre of ballads. though, it is a bit different due to it being a pop-rock ballad. but, duri still got to shine a lot due to it being a ballad, and really just showing off balladeer duri. it’s another comforting song and generally, the whole concept of baristas and stuff is something that’s very comforting to duri as a whole. generally, he can’t say anything bad about this song at all.

tempo: another god tier song!! though, the only thing duri might hold against the song is the fact that he didn’t get to be apart of the acapella part of the song. however, this holds another one of duri’s iconic lines, with him opening the song with “i can’t believe” and the way that he just sings it, which had often been mentioned in reviews of the song. nonetheless, this is a song that duri really likes, something that falls into the god tier. it simply falls into one of their best songs.

love shot: another incredible song. duri can’t say anything bad about it. it’s very reminiscent of lotto and duri feeling a bit sexy due to the cocky attitude of the song as a whole. generally he just felt very cool in this song and it’s one of his favorites among titan’s discography, he can’t deny that at all.

bad: simply, another god tier song. this song kind of brought titan back to their days of being mysterious heartthrobs, rather than the heartthrobs that they had become over the years. however, it did bring back some more versatility, especially for duri, as he showed off the aggression in his voice some more, like he used to in the older titan tracks - something that hadn’t really been needed the last few years for titan over all. this is another favorite of his, and the music video was a lot of fun - even if he wasn’t really a fan of the small rooms and had a hard time with that. lots of running again.

obsession: obsession is the god tier of god tier. however, that probably has to do with the fact that, once again, duri gets to feel like he’s in a 90s boy band, simply because of how the song is. he also finds it rather cool that they’re all essentially the evil versions of their selves in the music video and performances. there’s simply just something about this song and simply, it’s never going to get old in anyway.

now or never: essentially, he thinks this song is just okay. at least, okay till getting to the chorus. the beat is okay too, if he’s honest. he kind of wishes the choreography was attached to a different song. it’s another song that he can do without, but he doesn’t dislike it as much as he does some others.

o sole mio: this is honestly another song that’s just really good. he doesn’t have anything bad to say about it, she’s really just a whole banger! there isn’t one bad thing about the song in it’s entirely at all. he thinks it was a really good choice for a title track and believes it fits in well with what titan had released in the past.

enough: enough isn’t that bad, either. it’s definitely a song that falls into their emo wannabe rockstar boyfriend with the styling, and adds onto being mysterious heartthrobs. generally, it’s the second best song that titan has released from 2020 to 2021. however, he wouldn’t say it really falls into titan’s best songs either. but, it’s still a bit of a banger.

rpm: if he was honest, this song falls right behind both fanfare and roar in being apart of titan’s possible worst songs. it seems to not really fit in with them sound wise, and the music video is interesting, to say the least. something in duri wishes that a different song was chosen, while also wishing that titan had at least one more song to release this year, rather than leaving rpm as their last comeback of 2021.

#☆ ⠀ ── headcanon ⠀ !

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